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Studies in Written Language and Literacy

A multi-disciplinary series presenting studies on written language, with special emphasis on its uses in different social and cultural settings. The series combines sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of the acquisition and transmission of literacy and brings together insights from linguistics, psychology, sociology, education, anthropology and philosophy.

This edited volume constitutes the first serious, sustained examination of the study of children’s books for children aged from 0 to 3 with contributions by scholars working in different domains and attempting to assess the recognition of the role and influence of children’s literature on the cognitive, linguistic, psychological and aesthetic development of young children. This collection achieves a balance between theoretical, empirical, historical and cross-cultural approaches by examining the broad range of children’s books for children under three years of age, ranging from early-concept books through wimmelbooks and ABC books for small children to picture books that support the young child’s acquisition of behavioral norms. Most importantly, the chapters proffer new insights into the strong relationship between children’s books for young children and emergent literacy, drawing on current research in children’s literature research, visual literacy, cognitive psychology, language acquisition, picture theory and pedagogy.

The purpose of the volume is to open up new perspectives in the study of literacy by bringing together current research findings from linguistics, psychology, sociology and anthropology. The book divides into five parts. The first part deals with theoretical questions related to the definition and the modeling of the construct of functional literacy. The second part goes into the notion of literacy development. Both societal and individual aspects of literacy development are taken into account. In the next two parts the actual achievement of literacy in various regions of the world is dealt with. In part 3 the focus is on attaining literacy in developing societies, and in part 4 on attaining literacy in industrialized societies. In the final part the question is raised how functional literacy can be promoted through education. Starting from a cross-cultural perspective the central issue is how standards of functional literacy can be established throughout the world.<br />

Indigenous peoples around the world are calling for control over their education in order to reaffirm their identities and defend their rights. In Latin America the indigenous peoples, national governments and international organisations have identified intercultural education as a means of contributing to this process. The book investigates education for and by indigenous peoples and examines the relationship between theoretical and methodological developments and formal practice. An ethnographic study of the Arakmbut people of the Peruvian Amazon, provides a detailed example of the social, cultural and educational change indigenous peoples are experiencing, an insight into Arakmbut oral learning and teaching practices as well as a review of their conceptualisations of knowledge, pedagogy and evaluation. The models of intercultural education being promoted by Latin American governments are, nevertheless, biliterate and school-based. The book analyses indigenous and non-indigenous models based on different conceptualisations of culture and curriculum in the context of the Arakmbut search for an education which respects their dynamic oral cultural traditions and identity, provides them with a qualitatively relevant education about the wider society and addresses the intercultural lives they lead.

This book explores the social significance of letter writing. Letter writing is one of the most pervasive literate activities in human societies, crossing formal and informal contexts. Letters are a common text type, appearing in a wide variety of forms in most domains of life. More broadly, the importance of letter writing can be seen in that the phenomenon has been widespread historically, being one of earliest forms of writing, and a wide range of contemporary genres have their roots in letters. The writing of a letter is embedded in a particular social situation, and like all other types of literacy objects and events, the activity gains its meaning and significance from being situated in cultural beliefs, values, and practices. This book brings together anthropologists, historians, educators and other social scientists, providing a range of case studies that explore aspects of the socially situated nature of letter writing.<br />

This book explores the interrelation of literacy and religion as practiced by Western Christians in, first, historical contexts and, second, in one contemporary church setting. Using both a case study and a Foucauldian theoretical framework, the book provides a sustained analysis of the reciprocal discursive construction of literacy, religiosity and identity in one Seventh-day Adventist Church community of Northern Australia.
Critical linguistic and discourse analytic theory is used to disclose processes of theological (church), familial (home) and educational (school) normalisation of community members into regulated ways of hearing and speaking, reading and writing, being and believing. Detailed analyses of spoken and written texts taken from institutional and local community settings show how textual religion is an exemplary technology of the self, a politics constituted by canonical texts, interpretive norms, textual practices, ritualised events and sociopolitical protocols that, ultimately, are turned in upon the self. The purpose of these analyses is to show how, across denominational difference in belief (tradition) and practice, particular versions of self and society are constructed through economies of truth from text that constrain what can and cannot be articulated and enacted by believers.

The research in this unique collection lies at the interface between the fields of bilingualism and literacy. It deepens our understanding of the significance of reading and writing as social practices and opens up new lines of inquiry for research on multilingualism. The authors incorporate theoretical and methodological insights from both fields and provide detailed accounts of everyday practices of reading and writing in different multilingual settings. The focus is primarily on linguistic minority groups in Britain and on the language and literacy experiences of children and adults in rural and urban communities. Together, the chapters of the volume build up a rich and illuminating picture of specific ways in which literacy is bound up with cultural practices and with different ways of seeing the world. They also address fundamental questions about the relationship between language, literacy and power in multi-ethnic contexts. <br />

The purpose of this volume is to present recent research in the field of the acquisition of functional literacy and its precursors. The volume aims to capture the state of the art in this rapidly expanding field. An attempt is made to clarify the vague and often inconsistent definitions of functional literacy from the perspective of development. Cognitive, linguistic, educational, and social factors of literacy development are all taken into account. <br />The volume consists of three subsequent parts. The first part goes into phonological precursors of literacy development. In this part the focus is on the development of early language precursors of of reading and writing. The cultural foundations of these precursors are explored, and their links with reading development are dealt with in detail. Different psycholinguistic approaches are also proposed to explain the occurrence of literacy problems. In the second part, the scope is on the constraints of reading and writing efficiency at the word level and beyond. The acquisition of reading and writing is seen as a result from the interaction between phonological, orthographic, and semantic processes. A crosslinguistic perspective is taken on the role of writing system factors in the acquisition of literacy skills. The final part deals with the role of social and educational factors in literacy acquisition. Starting from a crosscultural perspective, the central issue is how the attainment of functional literacy is dependent on sociocultural variation. The predictors of more advanced levels of literacy development are considered, including foreign language literacy and adult literacy.<br /><br />

Text comprehension is a critical area of psychological and educational research, and has particular relevance to educational context. The general aim of this international volume Reading Comprehension in Educational Settings is to encourage excellence in research and to bring together teachers, students, researchers and other professionals from different disciplines (e.g. psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, education, information technology, and communication), as well as all those members of the general public who have an interest in the study of reading. The specific objectives of the different chapters in this volume are to analyze existing methods of studying the various aspects of reading comprehension, disseminate results already obtained by research groups working in the field and debate current and future trends in the study of reading.

This volume aims to raise awareness of the underlying complexities concerning student writing in the universities. The authors address a series of theoretical as well as practical questions regarding the literacies required of students in Higher Education, from the perspective of both students themselves and of their tutors. The research described here intends to move beyond the narrow confines of current policy debates and the quick fix solutions of writing manuals, to explore the epistemological, cultural, historical and theoretical bases of such writing. Issues addressed include the nature of competing epistemologies that underlie the writing process and the varying degrees of explicitness about what academic writing entails; ways of challenging the institutional marginalisation of academic writing as teaching, learning, and research practice; what counts as knowledge and how far it is mediated by the rhetorical conventions of one culture; to what extent the challenging of such rhetorical conventions is itself a crucial epistemological issue. Writing, in this volume, then, is addressed in terms of academic literacy practices involving relations of power, issues of identity and theories of knowledge.<br />

This book details the findings of a research project investigating the social uses of literacy in a range of contexts in South Africa. This approach treats literacy not simply as a set of technical skills learnt in formal education, but as social practices embedded in specific contexts, discourses and positions. What this means is made clear through a series of fine-grained accounts of social uses and meanings of literacy in contexts ranging from the taxi industry in Cape Town, to family farms, urban settlements and displacement sites, rural land holdings, and various sites during the 1994 elections, and among different sectors of South African society, Black, Colored and White.<br />Since the view of literacy presented here is so dependent on context, the book provides not only descriptions of literacy practices but also rich insights into the complexity of everyday social life in contemporary South Africa at a major point of transition. It can be read as a concrete way of understanding the emergence of the New South Africa as it appears to actors on the ground, focused through attention to one central feature of contemporary life &#8212; the uses and meanings of literacy. <br />&#8220;Using fascinating and carefully documented case-study material, this book raises vital questions about literacy and illiteracy, and about adult education. Above all, it questions the efficacy of any literacy programme which fails to acknowledge the many ways in which uneducated and so called &#8216;illiterate&#8217; people already use reading, writing and numeracy in their everyday lives.&#8221; <i>Jenny Maybin, The Open University, Milton Keynes</i><br />

The use of printed words to capture language is one of the most remarkable inventions of humankind, and learning to read them is one of the most remarkable achievements of individuals. In recent decades, how we learn to read and understand printed text has been studied intensely in genetics, education, psychology, and cognitive science, and both the volume of research papers and breadth of the topics they examine have increased exponentially. Theories of Reading Development collects within a single volume state-of-the-art descriptions of important theories of reading development and disabilities. The included chapters focus on multiple aspects of reading development and are written by leading experts in the field. Each chapter is an independent theoretical review of the topic to which the authors have made a significant contribution and can be enjoyed on its own, or in relation to others in the book. The volume is written for professionals, graduate students, and researchers in education, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. It can be used either as a core or as a supplementary text in senior undergraduate and graduate education and psychology courses focusing on reading development.

This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world – UK, Pakistan, US, South Africa, Hungary, Korea, Mexico – to illustrate and celebrate the many ways in which Roz Ivani&#269; has advanced the academic study of writing. Focusing on writing in different formal contexts of education, from primary through to further and higher education in a range of national contexts, the twenty one original contributions in the book critically engage with theoretical and empirical issues raised in Ivani&#269;’s influential body of work. In their exploration of writers’ struggles with the demands of dominant literacy the authors significantly extend understandings of writing practices in formal institutions. Organized around three themes central to Ivani&#269;’s work – creativity and identity; pedagogy; and research methodologies – the twelve chapters and nine personal and scholarly reflections reveal the powerful ways in which Ivani&#269;’s work has influenced thinking in the field of writing and continues to open up avenues for future questioning and research.

Writing is not just about conveying &#8216;content&#8217; but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the &#8216;me&#8217; they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the &#8216;self&#8217; which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)<br />The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students, providing:<br />&#149; a case study of one writer&#8217;s dilemmas over the presentation of self;<br />&#149; a discussion of the way in which writers&#8217; life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;<br />&#149; an interview-based study of issues of ownership, and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;<br />&#149; linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple, often contradictory, interests, values, beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions, which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.<br />The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.<br />The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.

This edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase.

Chinese, Japanese, South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long, intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, spectacular economic success. Together, these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population.

They use a variety of unique and fascinating writing systems: logographic Chinese characters of ancient origin, as well as phonetic systems of syllabaries and alphabets. The book describes, often in comparison with English, how the Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems originated and developed; how each relates to its spoken language; how it is learned or taught; how it can be computerized; and how it relates to the past and present literacy, education, and culture of its users.

Intimately familiar with the three East Asian cultures, Insup Taylor with the assistance of Martin Taylor, has written an accessible and highly readable book. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese is intended for academic readers (students in East Asian Studies, linguistics, education, psychology) as well as for the general public (parents, business, government). Readers of the book will learn about the interrelated cultural histories of China, Korea and Japan, but mainly about the various writing systems, some exotic, some familar, some simple, some complex, but all fascinating.

The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and historically have been, used in literacy and how they are learned, written, read, and processed by the eyes, the brain, and the mind. <br />In this second edition, the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts, added several new sections, and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest. <br />The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.